CHAPTER XIII
KILLED BY THE INDIANS
For the next few days we were all very busy. Tom was putting the finishing touches on our quarters, while Jack and I were doing the trapping, baiting, and skinning. I assisted Jack in trapping beaver and he helped me in killing buffalo and taking care of the wolfskins.
While working at these tasks we were riding the surrounding country, east and west, up and down the creek, and north and south in open prairie. At a distance of about three miles down the creek, on the north side, we found a series of connected sloughs leading off from the creek out into the prairie bottom, through which a string of little ponds ran for about a mile and then united with the main stream again.
These sloughs, bordered by a rank growth of rushes, made excellent feeding-grounds for water-fowl. It was easy here to procure all the ducks, geese, brant, and sand-hill cranes that we wished. On the prairie were plenty of antelope, with now and then a few deer and elk in the timber along the creek. Everywhere were seen bleached and bleaching buffalo bones—too common a feature of the landscape to attract more than a passing glance.
One day Jack and I had been killing some buffalo for wolf baits on the high prairie south of our camp. We had become separated by a couple of miles; each had killed his buffalo, and I had poisoned mine and started to Jack, who was waiting for me to prepare his buffalo for the wolves also. As I rode through a scattered lot of bones, where several animals seemed to have been killed together, I noticed among the lot a human skull. Looking more closely, I saw other human bones of the same skeleton and those of a horse, the hoofs of which, with the shoes still on, showed that it had not been an Indian's horse. Bones of wolves lay among the others.
Here, then, seemed the evidences of a past tragedy, and, wishing to have Jack come and help to read the signs, I rode out clear of this bone-yard, fired a shot from my rifle to attract his attention, and then began riding around in a circle—the usual signal in such cases—to call him to me.
He understood and galloped toward me. While he was coming I walked about among the relics, trying to solve the mystery of which these bones were the record. They had been somewhat scattered, by the wolves that had picked them, but their general lay indicated pretty clearly the relative situation of the man and animals at the time of their death. The bones had probably not been there more than about a year.
Although somewhat mixed and scattered, the general lay of the bones seemed to show the buffalo on one side, the horse on the other, and the man between them. The man's skull had a small bullet hole through it at the temples, which sufficiently indicated the immediate cause of his death; but whether this shot had come from an enemy or had been self-inflicted could not be determined by the signs.
While thus trying to interpret the indications, Jack reached me.